New York Times and other publishers sue Brave over AI content scraping

The New York Times sued browser maker Brave in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, 2 November, accusing the company of scraping publishers' copyrighted content and selling access to it to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. According to TechCrunch, a second, similar suit was filed the same day by the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel; The Next Web reports that filing came just hours after the Times' complaint.

What the complaints allege

At the centre of both cases is the Brave Index, which the publishers say contains more than 30 billion web pages. The complaints allege the index was assembled using a crawler that site operators can neither identify nor block, and that Brave then sold paid access to real-time content from that index to AI developers, for use in training models and answering user queries.

The Times' filing is unsparing in its language. It describes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" and states that the company "acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." The Times is seeking an injunction and damages.

Beyond the index itself, the suits target two browser behaviours. One is a Brave feature described in the filings as a paywall blocker, which the complaints say grants access to subscription content without a login. The other is Brave's practice of blocking publishers' own advertisements while selling its own ad products, as TechCrunch reports.

According to the published complaints, the newspapers bring five claims: direct copyright infringement, contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, anti-circumvention under the DMCA, and unjust enrichment. A spokesperson for the Times, Graham James, said Brave had ignored repeated requests to stop the practices at issue. Brave, founded in 2015 and reported to have raised roughly $250 million, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and all allegations remain untested in court.

The AI customers are named, not sued

Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere appear in the filings as customers of the index, not as defendants. That framing is notable: the publishers are pursuing the intermediary that collected and resold the content, rather than the AI companies that bought it, at least for now. It also continues a broader pattern for the Times, which has separately sued OpenAI and Perplexity over comparable copyright claims.

Why it matters

Browsers occupy an unusual position on the web: they fetch pages on behalf of users, and some, like Brave, have built search and data businesses on top of that activity. If a court finds that crawling pages and reselling access to them constitutes infringement, any company running both a large crawler and a data-licensing product faces a new category of legal exposure.

For AI companies, the case sharpens the due diligence question. The named customers are not defendants here, but their data pipelines run through intermediaries whose practices they do not fully control, and resold access now demonstrably carries litigation risk attached to it.

For publishers, the paired suits could become a template for challenging unlicensed aggregation: document the crawler activity, invoke the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions alongside the infringement claims, and pressure the supply chain rather than only its endpoints. The paywall-bypass claim opens a second front that could reach beyond Brave, since reader modes and privacy features in other browsers touch on similar territory.

The near-term signal to watch is the injunction request, which covers both the index product and the paywall-blocking setting. How broadly the court is willing to restrain those will indicate how much of this business model survives the litigation.